1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to computers, and more particularly to protecting data segments, such as protecting virtual cartridges between remotely located virtual tape libraries, in a computing environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
In today's society, computer systems are commonplace. Computer systems may be found in the workplace, at home, or at school. Computer systems may include data storage systems, or disk storage systems, to process and store data. Data storage systems, or disk storage systems, are utilized to process and store data. A storage system may include one or more disk drives. These data processing systems typically require a large amount of data storage. Customer data, or data generated by users within the data processing system, occupies a great portion of this data storage. Many of these computer systems include virtual storage components.
Virtual storage components are found in a variety of computing environments. A typical virtual storage component is the magnetic tape cartridge used via a magnetic tape drive. Multiple tape drives may be contained in a tape library, along with several slots to hold tape cartridges. Such data storage systems utilize storage components (usually direct access storage, such as disk arrays) to virtually present tape libraries or tape drives. Both types of technologies are commonly used for backup and recovery purposes. Virtual tape libraries, which integrate with existing backup software and existing backup and recovery processes, enable typically faster backup and recovery operations. It is often required that such data storage entities be replicated from their origin site to remote sites. Replicated data systems may externalize various logical data storage entities, such as files, data objects, backup images, data snapshots or virtual tape cartridges.